Local AI Image Generation is Getting Disturbingly Good

How To Make Money With AI Media

My Gaming + AI PC Setup

Used to generate everything in this talk.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 — RTX 3090, 24 GB VRAMwas $600now $2,000

DDR4 RAM modules — 64 GB RAMwas $110now $500

Best of 2024 - SDXL

Will Smith eating spaghetti, SDXL — Will Smith Eating Spaghetti

Five images of Will Smith eating spaghetti.

In 2024, AI image generators were well known for not getting hands right. These are perfect examples of that.

AI image generators are bad at fine details.

They were also bad at temporal cohesion. In other words, does something not make sense if it existed in real life. For example, it makes no sense for Will Smith to be holding spaghetti in his hand and have spaghetti on the table. The image generator sees the word spaghetti, it knows spaghetti can be in the hand or on the table, and it will draw both more often than not.

Skin looks plastic. Highlights are overblown.

However, because these AI image models are open source and running on your own hardware, you can retrain them. With a few hours of GPU training, you can get better results with special models. There is a special website for hosting all of these custom models, which I will show you at the end.

Another problem with early image generators is the idea of concept bleed. Bed of spikes example.

Clicking goes through them one by one.

Roughly 8.5 seconds for a 1024×1024 image.

It is important to note that AI, at this time, was terrible at text. It got somewhat there, but it was never good enough to use as is.

Best of 2025 - FLUX.1 DEV

Will Smith eating spaghetti, FLUX.1 dev — Will Smith Eating Spaghetti

Best of 2026 - Qwen2.1 (as good as nano banana)

Will Smith eating spaghetti, Qwen2.1 — Will Smith Eating Spaghetti

Qwen2.1 image with text — Images with Text

How Can You Make Money With AI Media?

Selling AI Clipart on Etsy - February 2025

Revenue

$1,000.00

My first and best AI media product was selling AI art on Etsy.

You might ask yourself, why would someone buy AI art when they can make it themselves?

1) You are not selling to tech-savvy consumers. You are selling to soccer moms. They don't have the expertise to mess with AI for an hour. Period.

2) You sell the images in bundles of 10–20, and upscale them so they always print clear on any printer. The upscaling step is what most soccer moms don't want to deal with.

The process is very easy to automate, and over the last 18 months, my shop has generated $2,700 in revenue.

These images were generated in 2025. With my expertise I could do a lot better in 2026.

The important advice to know is 1) your images must be cute and 2) they must contain text. The biggest mistake I made was not selling images that contain stylized text, because that's what soccer moms are looking for when they are putting these designs on a greeting card.

How Can You Make Money With AI Media?

AI Generated Horror Stories - February 2026

25,332 subscribers

Scary In Bed YouTube channel, 25.3 thousand subscribers

In 2 weeks, I was able to get 25,000 subscribers to my YouTube channel by making AI-generated, choose your own adventure horror stories.

Within 3–4 hours, I could generate many AI clips that I could splice together into a 1 minute horror video. By AI generating a starting frame for the video and plugging it into the video generator, you can control the style and tone of the video, and that's exactly what I did.

2 weeks of full time effort and I got about 1.5 million views on my shorts in this YouTube niche.

This is still a profitable niche. It still gets views. And recent advancements in local AI video generation mean I could generate these videos in about 45 minutes, as compared to 4 hours.

I'm going to pick it up again next year, and I'm certain I can monetize my channel with this strategy.

How Can You Make Money With AI Media?

AI Generated Games w/ Art - October 2026

Competitive Eating Simulator

What Hardware Can You Buy To Do All Of This?

RTX 5070 Ti

16GB VRAM

~25 sec per image

$900–$1,200

RTX 3090

24 GB VRAM

~15 sec per image

$1,500–$2,000

GMKtec EVO-X2 AMD Ryzen™ AI Max+ 395 AI Mini PC

64GB VRAM

~7 min per image

~$2,600

NVIDIA DGX Spark

64GB VRAM

~20 sec per image

$8,000–$10,000

Get Phone Alerts When That Hardware Is Cheap

Deal Notifier mobile app showing RTX 3090 alerts

Available on Android and iOS

Any questions?

Get phone alerts when GPUs + RAM are cheap online

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